


redoubt

by lupinely



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Lucretia Did Nothing Wrong, background Lucretia/Lup, but she maybe thinks she did.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-06
Updated: 2017-09-06
Packaged: 2018-12-23 23:54:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12000561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lupinely/pseuds/lupinely
Summary: Lucretia, trembling, closes her eyes while Merle and Magnus say things to her that she cannot comprehend. She grips her staff with one hand and presses the other open-palmed against the ground, digs her fingertips in the dirt, and then she starts to laugh through her sobs, uncontrollably, until she cannot breathe.Theydidit.





	redoubt

 

 

 

The first thing she does, with her family arrayed around her, old and new and all of them bearing truth, is fall to her knees and begin to weep, clutching at her staff to remain upright and barely managing. There is a large commotion—most people are cheering, as they should be, the world is saved, it’s _saved,_ they’ve done it at last—and only a few people notice the way Lucretia has collapsed: Magnus, who puts down Angus and tries to help her to her feet, and Merle, who is rubbing her shoulder a little awkwardly but it helps and hurts just the same, and Taako, who is dancing and holding hands with Lup as best he can (since fire is streaming from her hair), who makes eye contact with Lucretia, just briefly, just for a moment, before turning away and dazzling everyone around him with a smile.

Lucretia, trembling, closes her eyes while Merle and Magnus say things to her that she cannot comprehend. She grips her staff with one hand and presses the other open-palmed against the ground, digs her fingertips in the dirt, and then she starts to laugh through her sobs, uncontrollably, until she cannot breathe.

They _did_ it.

 

 

 

When the Bureau of Balance moonbase was first built, she had stood on its surface, alone, and surveyed it for a very long time. She thought about all the logistics: everything she would have to put in order, the people she would need to recruit, the backup plans she would need to painstakingly craft, the secrets she would need to keep.

 _Wait for sunrise,_ she tells herself, again and again; and she means not _sunrise,_ exactly, but the end of this long night of loneliness, the long tired exile that she banished herself to because it is better that she suffer this alone than watch each and every one of her friends fall apart under the regret of what inevitability had forced them to do.  _If they had just believed me,_ she thinks, and then closes her eyes tight. If they had believed her, yes—if she had deserved to be believed. And she doesn’t anymore. She knows that. But better that she damn herself than watch her friends, her family, in agony.

 _Yet isn’t that selfish, too?_ she asks herself, that small voice in her head that sounds so often like Lup’s—did she do this because she couldn’t bear to _watch_ them suffer, or truly because the reality of their pain had been too immense, too unforgivable, worse even than a hundred years on the run from a horror none of them could understand, worse than anything that might come after?

She doesn’t know. All this time—years, now—she still doesn’t fucking know. It is the sort of thing that you should know, she thinks: the sort of thing that matters. A thousand apologies live and die on her lips before she ever gets the chance to make them. Just keep going, Lucretia. You’ve done it before. You made it then. You can do it again.

 _(I fucking_ made _it—)_

 

 

 

The immediate aftermath of the Day of Story and Song is a blur even while it happens. After wiping the tears from her eyes and getting to her feet, Lucretia falls back onto her controlled, professional persona. She directs immediate aid to the people the most in need, finds accommodations for those without them now, ensures everyone in the Bureau of Balance is accounted for and taken care of, diverts resources to where they will be most useful. Her friends drift away from her, as she suspected they might: Magnus wants to be out there helping people directly, Merle wants to find his children, Barry and Lup want to be alone, and Taako and Davenport seem to want nothing to do with Lucretia. She lets them go. She knew that this is what the price might be. And winning doesn’t mean you also don’t lose everything.

Later, when she has retired to her quarters, seeking solitude (seeking it or retreating to it because it is familiar, because it is easy?), there is a knock at her door. She does not know who she expects when she opens it, but it certainly isn’t Angus, Carey, Killian, and Avi. They all look exhausted but happy and proud and a little fearful, too, like they don’t know what to make of Lucretia anymore now that they know her whole story.

“Madam Director...” Angus starts tentatively.

“Lucretia,” she says, “please.”

“Lucretia, then.” Carey puts her hand on Lucretia’s shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“I’m just fine,” Lucretia says.

Carey glances at Killian, who glances at Avi, who glances at Angus. Finally Angus pipes up. “The others have been looking for you for hours.”

“What?”

“Yeah.” He nods fervently. “Magnus and Merle and Barry and Lup and all of them.” He looks up at her. “Won’t you come see them?”

Lucretia leans for a moment against her staff. “Oh,” she says, quite unable to speak otherwise.

There is another pause, and then Angus rushes forward and throws his arms around her and hugs her tightly. She is slow to react but when she does she lowers her arm around him, too, and hugs him close. Carey and Killian and Avi are beaming at her.

“C’mon, boss lady,” Killian says. “Come be with your family.”

Lucretia, dazed, lets them lead her to the moonbase cafeteria, where a small celebration party is raging quite unchecked either by exhaustion or the lateness of the hour. Most Bureau of Balance employees are there, along with the entirety of the Starblaster crew, and a few other familiar faces. A cheer goes up throughout the room when Angus marches her in.

“Lucretia!” Lup shouts, and blasts a fireball through the roof of the building. There is a momentary hush as everyone stares.

“...Y’all don’t need this place intact anymore, right?” Lup says, and the room bursts into laughter.

Magnus rushes over, because of course he does, and sweeps Lucretia up into a huge and unrefusable bear hug. He squeezes her so tightly that she cannot return the hug even if she tried, and she drops her staff as he buries his face against her shoulder. “We’ve been waiting all day for you to show up!” he says, and just keeps hugging her until Barry coughs and taps Magnus’ arm.

“You’re crushing her there, bud.”

“Oh!” Magnus lets her go, and Lucretia can see that he is slightly punchdrunk, more on happiness and delight than liquor, but that, too. She smiles, because it is so familiar, and her heart aches so much, she missed this for so long, for so _long,_ all she wanted was these moments back, these small perfect wonderful moments that remind her that maybe everything she did was worth it, surely everything she suffered was, but maybe everything terrible she’d had to do, too....

Maybe. Maybe not. In the end, that is not her final decision to make, is it?

_(Hey, Lucretia, what do you want more than anything else in the world?_

_Hey, Lucretia—?)_

 

 

 

She presses the palm of her hand against Fisher’s tank, trying to calm the way her body won’t stop shaking. It’s been months— _months_ —of working alone, trying to fix the ship, to get everything running, to learn how to fly the fucking thing, to stay alive on the run from a world hell-bent on tracking her down and putting her on trial and murdering her the way it did her friends, every last one of them, and she and Fisher are the only ones left and if she dies, it’s all over. If she dies, the Hunger wins.

If she dies, that’s the end of everything.

Lucretia shuts her eyes and presses her forehead against the tank and tries to keep the tears from leaking from her eyes but she can’t stop it, has not been able to for a long long time. She thinks of them every day, holds their names and memories and faces close: Lup, Davenport, Barry, Magnus, Taako, Merle. Why had they been captured and not her? Why hadn’t one of them, someone who could have managed this, who could have done this right, Lup or Davenport or _any_ of them, been the one to escape instead of her? Out of all of them, that _she_ is the one upon whom the entirety of their mission now rests—she’s not worthy, she’s not worth it, but she has to be or everything every one of her friends has fought so many long years for will be nothing, will be dust, will be ash.

And she will not let that happen.

She opens her eyes and looks at Fisher. It reaches out a tentacle towards her, presses against the glass, and she presses back. Think of your family, Lucretia. What would they do in your place?

Fight. They would fight and fight and fight and survive and get it done. She knows they would. And she knows, too, that they all believe in her the same way that she believes in then. She does not know whether she deserves that—whether she is worth it—but right now, none of that matters. She has their trust. She has their love. And she is going to fucking show them, show everything, show the Hunger itself, that their faith in her is not misplaced.

 

 

 

 

Magnus, earnest as ever, tries to make peace in an impossible situation. The light inside the Starblaster makes shadows on his face like folded paper, an origami version of himself: “Let’s do the seven artifact thing. That doesn’t work, the next time we get the light of creation on a future cycle, Lucretia, and we can do your plan.”

He is leaning forward towards Lucretia, looking her dead in the eye, so heartfelt, so fucking sincere. Lucretia believes him: wholeheartedly. She also knows that it might not matter.

She swallows. Steels herself. She doesn’t know what the others draw on for faith in times like these, but for herself she has always drawn upon them. But now she does not know how to do that when she so fundamentally disagrees with them, when her heart aches with the thought of what they are about to do. She closes her eyes.

“Okay.”

They make the relics. And she waits for sunrise.

What follows is the darkest and longest night of her life.

 

 

 

“Hey, Lucretia.”

Lucretia is sitting on a hill, looking towards the faraway horizon of an unfamiliar planet during yet another cycle—which one is this? seventy-four—when Lup appears and sits next to her. They share a moment in silence before Lup breaks it. Lucretia wants to lean into her, wants to find some small source of comfort, wants to feel Lup’s arms around her, but she resists the urge. She is good at resisting.

Lup turns her head and smiles at Lucretia. Her short hair is ruffled by the breeze, and Lucretia thinks, _I’m sorry,_ without really knowing why.

Lup grins suddenly and knocks her shoulder against Lucretia’s. “You okay?”

“Yes.”

“You seemed really far away for a minute there.”

“Just...thinking.”

“I bet.” Lup closes her eyes and upturns her face to the sun. “Always thinking. Always got those gears turning.” She falls silent for a moment. “Thinkin bout anything good?”

“Not really.”

Lup lets out a short breath. “Me neither, these days.” She looks out into the distance for a long time. “It’s like...what are we doing, you know? Does any of this even matter?”

“I know.”

“I have to believe it does,” Lup says softly, so quiet, her voice a whisper. “I have to believe it, or I don’t know what I’d do.” And she turns her head and looks at Lucretia, her dark eyes shining. “Do you?”

Lucretia looks at her and thinks that, in this moment out of all moments, she really could believe, and does. “Yes,” she says. “I believe that everything we are doing does matter.”

Lup sighs. Then she leans against Lucretia. Lucretia closes her eyes. “That’s something, at least,” Lup says.

Lucretia leans her head against Lup’s so that the two of them are leaning against each other, now. They sit and listen to the wind, and Lucretia fancies that she can hear the sound of Lup’s breathing, if she listens hard enough.

“Hey,” Lup says quietly, after a long while, “Lucretia.”

Lucretia makes a noise to indicate that she is listening.

“What do you want? More than anything in the world.”

_What do I want more than anything in the world...?_

It is hard for Lucretia to answer, because she honestly does not know. What does she want? She wants the running to end. She wants the Hunger to die, or disappear, or be vanquished, or whatever it takes to get rid of it. She wants peace and quiet, to a certain extent. She wants her friends safe and happy, and this long purgatory to be over. But what does she want more than anything...?

While she is thinking, Lup slips her hand into Lucretia’s and holds hers tight.

“What I want,” Lucretia says, “more than anything...is it a cop out to say that I don’t know?”

“Yes.”

Lucretia laughs. “Okay. Let me think....” But it is not that hard, after all, to figure it out. “What I want more than anything,” she says, “is to lie in the sun, and not have anything to worry about anymore, and to have you there with me.”

She means _you_ in the plural, as in all of them, the seven of them alone; but she also means _you_ in the singular, her and Lup and silence all around them.

Lup squeezes Lucretia’s hand. “That sounds just about right,” she says.

Later—Lucretia doesn’t know when—Lup leans back, looks at Lucretia, and then leans forward and kisses her gently, once, on the mouth. For a moment everything that Lucretia wants is almost within grasp, almost in reach, and it is wonderful, it is enough. But of course it isn’t. Not yet. Not for any of them.

 

 

 

The Story and Song celebration party lasts all night long, and Lucretia vows to herself that she will not leave until the others do, until it is over. Won’t hide from them even if she wants to. They didn’t leave her at the end even though she told them to go, to get out of there, to be safe. Magnus, Merle, and Taako—even Taako, after everything—had instead looked back at her and said, without words, just with the expressions on their faces and the determination in their souls: _we’re. not. going. anywhere._

Her heart had broken then, as it had broken a hundred times before, maybe more, all those times that she wished she could see them again, her family, and couldn’t; all those times that she saw them at the moonbase and couldn’t spend time with them, or laugh with them; all those times that she remembered what it was like to face down the end of everything with them, a hundred times over, and know, _know,_ that she had strength and ferocity at her back because of them. Her heart breaks, and then it pieces back together as she looks at Merle and Magnus and Taako and understands that they mean this.

They are really not going fucking anywhere. Not this time. And she can’t make them.

Her gratitude for them is beyond words. She wonders if they can sense it, because she knows that she is not yet able to talk about it. Might not ever be. But she feels as if it is flowing off of her, a stream of pure joy and relief that cannot be stemmed and cannot be contained. She feels that if she looks at any of them too directly they will see it in her face, this pure uncontrollable love and gratefulness, and it is not that she is ashamed of how she feels but that she is fairly certain none of them is particularly receptive to any sort of gratitude from her, of all people, just now.

But she stays. She laughs and kisses people’s cheeks when they come up to her, Bureau of Balance employees who can’t believe her story, everything the seven of them have done. Merle makes her dance with him for a solid twenty minutes, and afterwards she is flushed and trembly and in high enough spirits to accept the glass of wine that Magnus somehow procured for her—everyone else is drinking beer or harder stuff. Magnus folds her into another hug, careful not to spill her wine, and whispers into her ear, _thank you,_ like he is the one who should be saying it and not her, a hundred times over, a thousand. Before she can react, he has wandered off and is saying something that makes Taako and the people around them laugh and laugh.

She brings the wineglass to her lips and smiles. She has never been so happy, so full of love. So full of light.

 

 

 

Taking Fisher’s child is the first decision she makes that feels truly selfish. Truly reprehensible. But she doesn’t know what to do anymore—she can’t do this alone. And this baby voidfish means that she doesn’t have to. It also means that Fisher will never trust her, never love her again; means that she is admitting to herself, for the first time, that she is failing. She can’t do this. She thought she could, and she staked everything on that. She wonders what her friends would say to her right now, if they could say anything about this. She doesn’t want to know.

 _Sometimes there are no good or bad decisions,_ Taako had said once—had it been Taako? How can she forget that, forget any of it...?— _There are just decisions._

She wonders if that is, strictly speaking, true.

 

 

 

The months that follow the Day of Story and Song are muddled and confusing, painful and wonderful all at once. The world comes together to rebuild what needs rebuilding, to preserve what needs preserving, and to look together to the future ahead. Lucretia is amazed to find that, for all the things she has planned for and considered and carefully deliberated over, she never actually thought about what would happen after. For so long, _after_ had been a faraway impossibility—a fool’s hope—something to strive for, but part of her always thought it could never be reached. After more than a hundred years of striving, maybe anyone would lose a little hope.

Her friends thrive. It is beautiful to see. She stole nearly a decade of their lives from them, in a way. It hurt some of them more than others. She is delighted to see that Magnus seems genuinely joyful, happy to be alive in a way that surely he hasn’t since Julia’s passing. Merle spends so much time with his children, helping them grow and learn. Barry and Lup get started on a handful of new projects, including making Lup a new physical body, and Taako...Taako has his heart back, and it shows. Davenport spends most of his time on his own, exploring this world so like and unlike their own on a ship nearly as grand as the Starblaster. He had not said anything to Lucretia before leaving: simply looked at her for a long moment, then bowed his head, and she did the same to him, tears springing to her eyes. Had he stayed any longer she would have tried to talk about it, and maybe that would have been a mistake. Too soon, perhaps. Too soon. It might always be too soon.

Lucretia tries to find her own path in this world reborn anew and beautiful. It shocks her, how difficult she finds this. For so long she had a goal, and a purpose—and no one to share it with. Now she is purposeless, but her life is hers to share with those she loves again. A worthwhile trade, if she can just figure out how to navigate it.

“Have you done it yet?” Lup asks her one day, and Lucretia asks, bewildered, “Done what?”

“Sat in the sun,” Lup says, “and not worried about anything.”

Lucretia laughs, and so does Lup. “I think that might be the impossible dream,” Lucretia says. “Not _worry?_ I don’t know whether I’m capable of that.”

Lup smiles at her and gives her a hug. “You should try it,” she says. “It might be easier than you think.”

Lucretia reaches out and grabs Lup’s hand after she pulls away, holding her fast. “Lup...thank you. For everything....”

Lup sighs and takes Lucretia’s face in her hands. She is a little shorter than Lucretia, but she looks right in her eyes. “Oh, Lucretia,” she says, and her smile is gentle. “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.”

Easy for her to say.

 

 

 

Lucretia wants to talk to Taako more than anything, but she holds herself back. That is another conversation that neither of them is ready for yet. But the memory of Taako looking at all of them, leaning against his glaive, and saying, “There’s a third option,” follows her everywhere she goes. He had said it so simply, like he wasn’t pulling her world out from underneath her, like he wasn’t changing it all, like he wasn’t fixing everything.

“There’s a third option”—and so there had been. He was right. He made her spell, all her decades of work, everything she sacrificed, worth it.

She wonders if he ever thinks about that moment like that.

Something tells her, probably not. That just isn’t like Taako.

It just shows how shortsighted she was, to ever try and do this on her own.

 

 

 

It will wake her up at night for years afterward. And by _it_ she means all of it—from the beginning to the end. That first horror of watching her home planet and everyone she ever knew overtaken and consumed by this destruction that she does not yet have a name for, standing on the deck of the Starblaster with seven people whom she does not yet know, watching reality destroyed, unwritten, overturned. And somehow they survived.

Somehow, the seven of them.

Somehow always the seven of them.

Everything that followed afterwards stays with her, as well; especially her year alone, where she would either live or die and upon that the entire fate of their mission solely depended. Her friends, turned to stone. And finally at what they thought could be the end of their journey, their relics made, when the world beneath them began, slowly, but with great certainty and efficiency, to tear itself apart. How that in turn tore the rest of them apart—the knowledge, undeniable and irrefutable, that this was their fault; that they were responsible, and not the Hunger, for the suffering that existed in this plane of reality.

Then the years after that: after she erased that pain from her friends’ minds and bore it alone, because that was better, that was simpler. Years of solitude, of exile, but that was all right; that is not what haunts her still. Instead it is the question that she can’t escape—never could escape then and can’t even now, when it is all over.

Did she do the right thing?

 _Yes,_ she thinks to herself, or perhaps _maybe._ But that means nothing to her. After all this time, right/wrong, survival/death, success/failure have all started to blur together, and she doesn’t think there is that deep a difference between any of them as she used to think.

The right thing? Maybe. But a  _good_ thing? She doesn't think so.

_(There’s a third option....)_

It still baffles her, paralyzes her, to know that any of her friends have forgiven her. And yet they have.

 

 

 

One day, Lucretia finally tries it. She climbs a tall hill that overlooks the surrounding countryside and sits there with her knees drawn up to her chest, just looking. The sun is warm and gentle, and when she looks at the sky she doesn’t think about millions of eyes all opening and gazing down at her hungrily, starving to death. The wind is warm, and she can see Neverwinter in the distance, bustling quietly, and she doesn’t worry about anything.

Carey and Killian’s wedding is fast approaching. When it comes, it will be one year since the Day of Story and Song: one year since the start of their new lives, their new happinesses. Everyone will be together again, and there will be joy and laughter and dancing and light. Everything that a life should have—including hers. Lucretia closes her eyes and feels the wind on her face. Breathes in. This is the world that she fought so long to save. This is the world that she shares with her family and friends. This is the world where she must make her life now.

She thinks, perhaps, that she is finally ready.

 

 

 

 


End file.
